Friday, May 31, 2013

Weekend Art Challenge
Click through to see this weekend's art and the design requirements for your card submission, due Monday morning. Every submission warrants feedback, which I will try to provide, and which everyone is welcome to provide as well.

If you choose, you may use that feedback to revise your submission any number of times. I will post and review the most recent submission from each designer some time on Monday, life permitting. To help ensure I recreate your design accurately, please use CARDNAME instead of ~ and don't use the {} symbol images in your submissions.

Wednesday, May 29, 2013

Cool Card Design of the Day5/29/2013 - Back in Alpha, you could design a top-down card, figure out what color it best evoked and print it. 15,000 cards later, every design exists in the context of everything that came before it.

Excerebrate explores the flavor of removing a creature's brain, rendering it a mindless zombie, devoid of the unique characteristics its mind brought to the table. That feels pretty black, so that's where we start.

Tuesday, May 28, 2013

Cool Card Design of the Day5/28/2013 - What kind of tutor (card-searching) can red have? We discussed the red member of the Gifts Ungiven mega-cycle back when we were developing M13ga. Here's another way to do it:

Happy Memorial Day to all those who celebrate it! Throw a burger on the grill and grab a soda from the fridge, cause we're wrapping up the first wave of Suvnica design this week. Let's take a look at Rakdos and Simic.

A tremendous amount of what made Ravnica so interesting was its implementation of cycles and how it developed them over the course of three sets. The cycles on RtR were a little less noteworthy, since they were spread out across two sets (less room to change them) and the sets they were in were much smaller (set sizes were reduced around the time of Shards). A major part of the Suvnica project is going to be looking into old cycles and redesigning them to match our new visions of the guilds, as well as creating other cycles from scratch. This was our first stab at the latter category - here's what we came up with.

Friday, May 24, 2013

Weekend Art Challenge
Click through to see this weekend's art and the design requirements for your card submission, due Monday morning. Every submission warrants feedback, which I will try to provide, and which everyone is welcome to provide as well.

If you choose, you may use that feedback to revise your submission any number of times. I will post and review the most recent submission from each designer some time on Monday, life permitting. To help ensure I recreate your design accurately, please use CARDNAME instead of ~ and don't use the {} symbol images in your submissions.

Tuesday, May 21, 2013

Doing this week slightly out of order. The design challenge for week 4 has already been posted. In the meantime, let's see what you guys had to say about bureaucracy, scholarship, and inevitably boring games of magic.

You guys are seriously prolific designers. Week 3 doubled the size of the Suvnica card file, moving from 70 to 144 cards. 74 cards is a lot to process and review. I'm in the middle of writing up the card reviews, but it may be a little while longer before they're ready. In the meantime, I wanted to get this week's challenge posted so we can try to double the size of the card file again. Exponential growth FTW!

Friday, May 17, 2013

Weekend Art Challenge
Click through to see this weekend's art and the design requirements for your card submission, due Monday morning. Every submission warrants feedback, which I will try to provide, and which everyone is welcome to provide as well.

If you choose, you may use that feedback to revise your submission any number of times. I will post and review the most recent submission from each designer some time on Monday, life permitting. To help ensure I recreate your design accurately, please use CARDNAME instead of ~ and don't use the {} symbol images in your submissions.

Thursday, May 16, 2013

Cool Card Design of the Day5/16/2013 - What if the newly enlightened slivers, with their humanoid shapes and their new-fangled adoption of local hives instead of one universal hive evolved one step further and started electing presidents or allowing non-slivers to join their ranks?

Wednesday, May 15, 2013

Cool Card Design of the Day5/15/2013 - Yesterday I introduced Twin, which is a neat card-sink mechanic, but it is limited in scope because it only doubles effects, and not everything can be doubled. Today, I share Focus, which is basically the same idea but with a more flexible execution. That costs us some consistency (and thus identity) as well as some elegance, but I suspect it's worth it.

Tuesday, May 14, 2013

Like most of you, I was horrified when I saw the art for the new slivers. The originals felt so deliciously alien and menacing; how could they replace them with these goofy dreadlocked humanoids? But when I sat down and actually compared the art straight across, I realized that the new style made the creatures' abilities clearer. Much clearer.

(5/16 Update: Something went kahblewy when I tried to check in on the blog from my phone this evening, and this page reverted to a very old draft. I'm reconstructing it from my RSS feed, and I'm hoping that the comments and the post stayed intact. If you see that your comment was lost, please repost.)
Alright. Four guilds down, six to go. Before we talk this week's guilds though, I wanted to start discussing something that came up in last week's design challenge.

So far, everyone has been pretty good about designing across different rarities. Out of the 70 cards sitting in the Suvnica file on my computer so far, we have about 25 commons, another 25 uncommons, 16 rares and 4 mythics. While a few of the submitted commons should probably be bumped up to uncommon, by and large everyone has been doing a phenomenal job with them.

Cool Card Design of the Day5/14/2013 - Today is about a keyword, Twin, which is (yet another) variant of kicker. When you cast a card with twin, you can turn another card in your hand into a copy of it and cast it for free. Where most kicker effects act as mana sinks—giving your extra land meaning in the late game—twin acts as a card sink, trading useless cards (like extra land) for upgraded effects.

That serves a very different purpose and I'm not entirely sure what kind of set would call for a card sink rather than a mana sink. If you've got ideas where this would be more useful or less useful, let me know in the comments.

During the selection process for our set design project (which ended up as Tesla), there was a lot of discussion about worldbuilding, story, and appropriate flavor for a Magic set. Many readers voiced interest in "combination" worlds; that is, Mummies vs. Cowboys, or Victorian steampunk + Egyptian archaeology. I don't find these visions compelling as themes for a marketable Magic set. In fact, when Magic goes top-down, it's safest to stick to the Theme Park Version.

Friday, May 10, 2013

Weekend Art Challenge
Click through to see this weekend's art and the design requirements for your card submission, due Monday morning. Every submission warrants feedback, which I will try to provide, and which everyone is welcome to provide as well.

If you choose, you may use that feedback to revise your submission any number of times. I will post and review the most recent submission from each designer some time on Monday, life permitting. To help ensure I recreate your design accurately, please use CARDNAME instead of ~ and don't use the {} symbol images in your submissions.

Cool Card Design of the Day5/8/2013 - How can you simplify Allies to make them appropriate for the core set? It's neat and fun that each Ally activates whenever a new one joins the party, but it's a lot to keep track of. It also leads invariably to stacking of triggers, something I'm sure we want to minimize in the core set, since the LIFO nature of the stack, and the stack itself, remains elusive and confusing to new players. What we can't afford to lose is scaling: Each Ally needs to get better the more that you have.

Today I propose that if you make all the Allies virtual-vanillas (creatures that have an effect when you first cast them but can be treated like vanilla creatures afterward), you'll have the simplest tribal scaling effect possible:

Tuesday, May 7, 2013

Wizards revealed Monday night that Slivers are returning to Magic in this Summer's core set and that they're getting a face-lift, both visually and mechanically. Some players are unhappy with this news, while a lot are ecstatic, but pretty much everyone is surprised.

While I support them getting some new visual concepts, I do fall on the side that full-on humanoid was a bit too far, but I'm not here to talk about that. Doug Beyer talks about that here if you want to learn more.

I'm more interested in analyzing the logic R&D used to bring us Slivers in the core set. I imagine it starts out pretty simple. The core set wants to reward established players with some nostalgia, while remaining accessible to new players. New players love linear mechanics and tribal themes and (many) old players love Slivers.

(6/10: As originally published, the design review for Orzhov was incorporated into the Week 2 Design Challenge. I've moved them out of that article and into their own pages for easier navigation and uniformity in the reviews. Some comments on the content of this section are still contained in the original article)

(6/10: As originally published, the design review for Gruul was incorporated into the Week 2 Design Challenge. I've moved them out of that article and into their own pages for easier navigation and uniformity in the reviews. Some comments on the content of this section are still contained in the original article)

(6/10: This post originally incorporated the design reviews from Week 1 for Gruul (now located here) and Orzhov (now located here). I moved them when making the Suvnica design index for easier navigation and uniformity. Some of the comments below may refer to the design reviews.)

Friday, May 3, 2013

Weekend Art Challenge
Click through to see this weekend's art and the design requirements for your card submission, due Monday morning. Remember that you may ask for feedback by mid-day Sunday and redesign your submission once after you get it.

Thursday, May 2, 2013

Cool Card Design of the Day5/2/2013 - One of black's favorite shticks is Great Power With Great Risk. What if you could stack your deck however you like? There are dark forces that can make that happen for you…

Wednesday, May 1, 2013

Today's puzzle contains the answer to the question: who was the first to make it through the Dragon's Maze? For each guild, there's a crossword-style clue. The answers associated with the ten guilds fit together into a pattern. Figure out how the pattern works, and you'll unlock the identity of the winning maze runner!

Azorius: Hangman's need

Boros: Lowest point

Dimir: Cost that can be paid while Sudden Shock is on the stack

Golgari: Secret rulers of Mercadia

Gruul: Type of bottle you get by combining two Bösium Strips

Izzet: It may be formal or fuzzy

Orzhov: "White & _____" (Weird Al single)

Rakdos: Owl from Tidehollow

Selesnya: Checkers' owner

Simic: Like Hepburn's holiday

The answer to this puzzle is posted here. Comments are disabled to prevent spoilers.

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About Us

We met as competitors and collaborators in the second Great Designer Search. After the contest was over, we decided we still had things to say about designing Magic: the Gathering. So we started a blog.